After the Hurricane, Bahamas

Image actions

Currently Off View

Date:

1899

Artist:

Winslow HomerAmerican, 1836-1910

About this artwork

Revered as America’s master of watercolor, Winslow Homer did not begin working in the medium until the mature age of thirty-seven. As a watercolorist, Homer adapted his practice to the diverse locales he visited. His sojourns in the tropics took him to the Bahamas, Bermuda, Cuba, and various locations in Florida. In each new environment, the self-taught artist pushed the flexible medium in new directions as he applied his increasingly sophisticated understanding of color and light to a new set of atmospheric conditions. This compelling watercolor was painted during Homer’s second trip to the Bahamas in the winter of 1898–99. Depicting a luckless man washed up on the beach, surrounded by fragments of his shattered craft, the work demonstrates the artist’s fascination with the rapid and dangerous weather changes of the region. Here sunlight glints through gradually thinning storm clouds. Homer employed thickly applied opaque red and yellow pigments for the seaweed tossed on the sand, creating a contrast with the thin washes and fluid brushstrokes that he used to render the receding waves.

The Art Institute of Chicago, “Twenty Water Colors by Winslow Homer, Martin Ryerson Collection,” January 5–June 16, 1916, no cat.

Springfield Art Association, December 2, 1916.

Pittsburgh, Pa., Carnegie Institute, “Winslow Homer and John Singer Sargent: An Exhibition of Water Colors,” November 1–27, 1917, cat. 17; also traveled to the Cleveland Museum of Art, November 30–December 31, 1917, the Toledo Museum of Art, January 1918, the Detroit Museum of Art, February 2–28, 1918, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, March 1918, the Milwaukee Art Institute, April 1918, the City Art Museum of St. Louis, May 5–26, 1918, and the Memorial Art Gallery, University of Rochester, New York, June 6–July 7, 1918.

The Art Institute of Chicago, “Watercolors by Winslow Homer, Lent by Martin A. Ryerson,” October 1–26, 1920, no cat.

The Art Institute of Chicago, “Watercolors by Winslow Homer from the Collection of Martin A. Ryerson,” April 1926, no cat.

The Art Institute of Chicago, “Watercolors by Winslow Homer from the Collection of Martin A. Ryerson,” July–Fall, 1926, no cat.

The Buffalo Fine Art Academy, Albright Art Gallery, “An Important Group of Paintings in Oil and Water Color by Winslow Homer: Loaned by The Art Institute of Chicago,” December 15, 1929–January 6, 1930, cat. 14.

Los Angeles County Museum of Art, “Eight American Masters of Watercolor,” April 23–June 16, 1968, n.p., cat. 10 (ill.); also traveled to the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum, San Francisco, June 28–August 18, 1968, and the Seattle Art Museum, September 5–October 13, 1968.

New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, “Winslow Homer,” April l3–June 3, 1973, pp. 120 and 141, cat. 153 (ill.), cat. by Lloyd Goodrich; also traveled to the Los Angeles County Museum, July 3–August 15, 1973, and The Art Institute of Chicago, September 8–October 21, 1973.

New York, The New York Cultural Center, “Three Centuries of the American Nude,” cat. 153; also traveled to the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, August 6–September 21, 1975; and the University of Houston Fine Art Center, October 3–November 16, 1975.

Philadelphia Museum of Art, “American Watercolor in the Age of Homer and Sargent”, February 23 - May 14, 2017, pp. 314-316, fig. 266 (ill.), cat. by Kathleen A. Foster.

The artist to his brother, Charles S. Homer, Jr. (1834–1917), New York, by 1910 [according to correspondence from Abigail Booth Gerdts to the Art Institute, February 10, 2007]. Charles W. Gould (1849–1931), New York, by 1915 [Brooklyn exh. cat. 1915]. Sold by Knoedler and Company, New York, to Martin A. Ryerson (1856–1932), Chicago, November 11, 1915 [invoice]; given to the Art Institute, 1933.

Object information is a work in progress and may be updated as new research findings emerge. To help improve this record, please email .